A characteristic Roots-type blower has two parallel, equal-sized, counter-rotating, lobed rotors in a housing. The housing interior typically has two parallel, overlapping, equal-sized cylindrical chambers in which the rotors spin. Each rotor has lobes that interleave with the lobes of the other, and is borne on a shaft carried on bearings, although both the shaft and the bearing arrangement may be integral at least in part to the rotor and/or the housing. In modern practice, rotor lobes of Roots-type blowers have screw, involute, or cycloidal profiles (those shown in the figures of this application are cycloidal), typically approximated as a series of arcs, and are driven by 1:1-ratio gears housed within a compartment separate from the rotor chamber. One of the rotor shafts is generally driven by an external power source, such as an electric motor, while the other is driven from the first. An inlet port and an outlet port are formed by removal of some portion of the material along the region of overlap between the cylindrical chamber bores. Net flow is transverse to the plane of the rotor shafts: the pumped material moves around the perimeter of the rotors from inlet to outlet, drawn into the blower as the interleaved lobes move from the center of the cavity toward the inlet port, opening a void; carried around the chamber in alternate “gulps” of volume between two lobes of a rotor in a cylinder, released to the outlet port by the lifting of the leading lobe of each successive gulp from the cylinder wall, then forced out the outlet port as each lobe enters the next interlobe trough of the opposite rotor near the outlet port.
The number of lobes per rotor may be any; for example, two-, three-, and four-lobed rotors are known. So-called gear pumps are variations on Roots-type blowers that use involute lobe shape to allow the lobes to function as gears with rolling interfacial contact; such designs also allow an option of differential numbers of teeth.
Before the early 1900s, lobes of Roots-type blowers were straight (lines defining the surfaces were parallel to the respective axes of rotation) rather than helical. Blowers with such lobes produce significant fluctuations in output during each rotation, as the incremental displaced volume is non-constant. Leakback (flow from the outlet side back to the inlet side) between properly-shaped straight lobes can be substantially constant, however, to the extent that all gaps can be made uniform and invariant. Developments in manufacturing technology by the 1930s included the ability, at reasonable cost, to make gear teeth and compressor lobes that advance along the axes of rotation following a helical path. This led to Roots-type blowers with effectively constant displaced volume rather than discrete pulses, such as those disclosed by Hallet, U.S. Pat. No. 2,014,932. Such blowers have displayed pulsating leakback, however, so that the net delivered flow remains non-constant.